How do I read image data from a URL in Python?

Question

In Python3 the StringIO and cStringIO modules are gone.

In Python3 you should use:

from PIL import Image
import requests
from io import BytesIO

response = requests.get(url)
img = Image.open(BytesIO(response.content))

Using a StringIO

import urllib, cStringIO

file = cStringIO.StringIO(urllib.urlopen(URL).read())
img = Image.open(file)

The following works for Python 3:

from PIL import Image
import requests

im = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

References:

• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/1151
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/CHANGES.rst#280-2015-04-01

Using requests:

from PIL import Image
import requests
from StringIO import StringIO

response = requests.get(url)
img = Image.open(StringIO(response.content))

Python 3

from urllib.request import urlopen
from PIL import Image

img = Image.open(urlopen(url))
img

Jupyter Notebook and IPython

import IPython
url = 'https://newevolutiondesigns.com/images/freebies/colorful-background-14.jpg'
IPython.display.Image(url, width = 250)

Unlike other methods, this method also works in a for loop!

Use StringIO to turn the read string into a file-like object:

from StringIO import StringIO
import urllib

Image.open(StringIO(urllib.requests.urlopen(url).read()))

For those doing some sklearn/numpy post processing (i.e. Deep learning) you can wrap the PIL object with np.array(). This might save you from having to Google it like I did:

from PIL import Image
import requests
import numpy as np
from StringIO import StringIO

response = requests.get(url)
img = np.array(Image.open(StringIO(response.content)))